Bush’s 4th of July speech

Odd that President Bush would want to equate the American Revolution to the Iraq war. After all, American colonists were the insurgents in that revolution and were never defeated by the British Empire, the world’s greatest power at the time. In fact, while several of our generals speak of an average of ten to twenty years to defeat insurgencies, one wonders what insurgencies they are talking about. The modern era has seen the end of all the great colonial empires, with European occupiers successfully driven from territories throughout Africa and Asia by insurgencies that have out-lasted occupiers, not the other way around. The loose ends left in the wake of these dead empires account for much of the world’s ongoing conflict but there certainly haven’t been many ten or twenty year resolutions.

While Bush’s analogy is almost completely meaningless, so little does the situation in Iraq correspond to the American Revolution, his role in such an analogy would have to be closer to that of King George III, also known as Mad King George, than it is to any of our own revolutionary founders. As to the promise of success if we are only patient and steadfast, in the past hundred years this has rarely proved to be the case. All the insurgents have to do is keep up the pressure until the occupiers find the price of staying too high and the benefits too low. Most Americans believe that is exactly where we are now.

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